Because biofictionalists name their protagonist after a real person, many wrongly assume that their works are an effort to represent the taken-from-life figure with as much accuracy as possible. By analyzing Hong Ying's K: The Art of Love, which is part biofiction (Julian Bell, son of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf, is one of the protagonists) and part roman & agrave; clef (Lin is another protagonist, and she is very loosely based on the famous Chinese writer, Ling Shuhua), Lackey demonstrates that fiction writers metaphorize rather than represent the lives of real people, thus offering a more rigorous and grounded model for analyzing and assessing biofictions and roman & agrave; clefs and distinguishing them from biography and life-writing.
Literary critics in the energy humanities rarely treat smell as a resource for analytical deliberation. But smells hide truths about the environmental risks we create and inhabit in our petroculture. By studying oil’s odors within Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep , this essay asserts the importance of embracing “olfactory ecologies”: methods of using our noses to sense environmental dangers that are unseen or unnoticed. I argue that Chandler’s imperfect detective Philip Marlowe can help readers train their noses to detect how olfactory pollution induces physical and mental harm.
This essay considers the micro-genre of the “heiress narrative” in Alice Munro’s “Corrie” and Henry James’s Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady . It argues that both writers use the formal technique of “foreshortening,” a term James borrowed from the pictorial arts, as a means of conjuring a sense of character dimensionality that also serves as a vector of social critique. Both employ foreshortening to create a characterological depth-effect that is pitched against a male-dominated consumer culture that operates according to its own reductionist logic, constructing women as mere instruments of wealth accumulation.
Through a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant , this essay makes the case for a postcritical psychoanalysis, synthesizing two interpretive approaches that scholars often pit against one another. The first part of the essay reviews postcritical and surface reading, picking up moments in which they unexpectedly resonate with psychoanalytic object relations. In a postcritical psychoanalytic spirit, Facundo then revises the definition of empathy from imagining oneself in the shoes of another to an irresolvable tension between sameness and difference. Finally, an analysis of The Buried Giant shows how this understanding of empathy plays out among the characters and reader.
This essay examines Jean Rhys's often overlooked engagement with Catholicism in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Over and against British Empire and its English Protestantism, Rhys draws on Catholicism to construct a martyr's tale for her Creole protagonist, Antoinette Cosway. This Catholic framework of martyrdom enables a triumphant reading of Antoinette's self-immolation-her act of resistance against her English, Protestant-coded husband. In turn, the redemptive Catholicism of Wide Sargasso Sea prompts a rereading of Rhys's source text, Jane Eyre, to expose the pitfalls that Protestantism poses for Bront & euml;'s bildungsroman.
This essay considers the legal and literary construction of terra nullius through the early fiction of Australian author Gerald Murnane. Focusing on The Plains and “Land Deal,” I explore how Murnane puts to work settler-colonial myths of empty land, property, and possession. By staging rival ontologies of land between Indigenous custodianship and settler commodification, I suggest that this work dramatizes the imaginative and juridical mechanisms by which terra nullius was rendered present and real. Murnane’s fiction can be thought of as an implicit challenge to the colonial impulse to impose meaning, revealing the enduring tension between narrative, law, and landscape.
This essay explores a newly emergent narrative positioning for minor or secondary queer characters whose queerness exists at the edges of a text, while avoiding narrow framings of queer exceptionalism and tired and essentialist tropes of sexual difference. This essay shows how this queer figure departs from earlier modes of queer representation. Tracing these peripheral queer figures in recent historical fiction that explores the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the essay focuses on three recent texts that center on this period: Anna Burns's award-winning novel Milkman (2018), Lisa McGee's teen drama Derry Girls (2018-2022), and Louise Kennedy's novel Trespasses (2022).
Andrew Pepper's 2016 Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State places relationships among the individual, capital, and the state at the center of crime fiction's concerns. My goal here is to rethink Pepper's compelling counterhistory of the crime novel by placing gender at its center. Specifically, Iam concerned with how American women's crime fiction of the 1940s engaged contemporary debates over women's citizenship. I examine Dorothy B. Hughes's 1943 crime/espionage novel, The Blackbirder, as a feminist critique of the patriarchal state, a deconstruction of the public/private binary, and an allegory about gendered models of citizenship. As the expression of wish fulfillment, narratives of intrigue allow readers to engage their political imaginaries, to speculate on the nature of statehood and citizenship. As documents of recruitment and survival, spy narratives allegorize civic responsibility by figuring competing loyalties to one's country, one's family, or oneself. -Allan Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture "Some day we women will get hold of this world and there won't be any more war. Women can settle each other's hash without slugging it out with fists or bombers." -Dorothy B. Hughes, The Blackbirder
